Today, users of messaging services, such as Microsoft Outlook, and personal file management services, such as Windows Explorer, must maintain separate directory structures for each instance of those applications. For example, the directory structure of a personal file directory (viewed, e.g., in Windows Explorer) has no relationship to the directory structure that is used to store emails (viewed, e.g., in Outlook), unless the user manually creates a relationship between the directory structures and continues to align them. While it is possible to manually copy messages from a messaging application to a personal file manager application, the latter application would not show useful information, such as “from” and “to” headers associated with the message. Similarly, while it is possible to manually copy a file stored in a personal file manager application to a folder in a messaging application, the latter application does not usually display the file type (e.g., Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat), and regular practice of this would bloat the associated .pst files, which can be somewhat prone to corruption.
There is no apparent reason to assume that users would want to organize messages any differently from the way they organize personal files. Much time is frequently wasted in searching for messages and files stored in the directory structures of different applications because there is no option for automatically aligning the directory structures of the different applications. Even if automatic alignment of the directory structures was possible, some time would still be wasted as a result of having to propagate the contents of one application into the corresponding directory locales of the alternate application, rather than having the contents automatically aligned and being able to see both files and messages within either application.